Daily Routines of 26 Famous Creative People

Mozart, Hugo, Hemingway

I was having a conversation with my friend and fellow writer Soldana about creative routines.

It is difficult when you are not in art school to be your own creative boss and employee.

Often, the best ideas are birthed simply because the artist chose to invest their time in them, not because they are better than yours.

As

Erifili Gounari

puts it,

Good art, above all else, is honest. As consumers of media, books, content, what resonates with us the most is unexpected vulnerability. Real, honest and raw depictions of the human psyche that we can relate to deeply in a way we wouldn’t have expressed as easily ourselves.

-the vulnerable internet it-girl

So, how do we make space to make good art?

I went on to explore the daily routine famous writers and how they got their work out into the world.

For example, Joan Didion says she spent “most of the day working on a piece not actually putting anything on paper, just sitting there, trying to form a coherent idea and then maybe something will come to me about five in the afternoon and then I’ll work for a couple of hours and get three or four sentences, maybe a paragraph.

“I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day.”

The drink helps. It removes me from the pages. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in.”

And Ernest Hemingway wrote first thing in the morning to spend time with his stories almost like a mistress. “When I am working on a book or a story

“I write every morning as soon after first light as possible.”

There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there.”

But even if you don’t consider yourself an artist, I think you can learn from creatives in general.

Do you have a business you are dying to start?

Do you have a book burning inside you to write?

Maybe your ideas can be birthed through one of their timetables.